The present invention relates to a food forming apparatus and particularly to an apparatus for forming nonsymmetrical shaped food products from a portioning and pumping apparatus.
Currently, symmetrical food products such as meatballs are formed by an iris diaphragm driven by an induction motor to shape the food products fed thereto by a food pump. Opening and closing the diaphragm is set at a constant rate limiting the product to symmetrical shapes such as spheres or spheroids.
The prior art includes U.S. Pat. No. 4,712,272 to Soodatler, which discloses an apparatus for portioning, shaping and dispensing a plurality of spherical meatballs. Food product is compressed and moved into a positioning area, given a rod-like shape and then moved into a shaping area prior to dispensing.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,039,295 to Cheung discloses an apparatus for forming food material into various shapes such as meatballs and cylindrical egg rolls. A motor rotates a rotor with scrapers forcing the food material into a channel for compression purposes. A mold cavity is located relative to the rotor rim to receive and shape the food material.
Also of some interest are U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,919,509 to Cremers, et al; 5,678,474 to Hall and 4,036,442 to Barnes.
In contrast to the prior art, this invention involves a vector drive which controls a motor driving an iris diaphragm in segments of a 360 revolution. The motor may be controlled to start, stop, speed up, slow down and reverse during a single feed of a food pump. This permits using the iris diaphragm to produce non-symmetrical shapes such as chicken drumsticks, fish and torpedoes in addition to meatballs. The vector drive uses a standard induction motor while a servo drive using the principles of this invention would require a more expensive synchronous drive motor. The prior art lacks the flexibility to produce different shapes using a food pump and the conventional iris diaphragm.